Author: Carolyn Kolb

Unpacking “Saratoga Trunk”

“No matter what I say I am – that I am. I shall be what it suits me to be. “ Clio Dulaine, heroine of the 1941 blockbuster novel “Saratoga Trunk,” is the beautiful daughter of a free woman of…

The Orleanianan at the Automat

New Orleanians take pride in their city’s food: home-cooked, created by Creole chefs, beloved by gourmets worldwide. Yet, New Orleans has also contributed to some decidedly American eating habits. In fact, the earliest American fast food innovation had an Orleanian…

Out to Dry

  Nineteenth-century New Orleanians shared our need for clean clothes. A note in the Louisiana Advertiser newspaper of December 5, 1826 offered a much-needed service: “To hire: a good Creole washer-woman, cook, etc. speaks French and a little English. Enquire…

Henry Clay Warmoth

Henry Clay Warmoth does not figure largely in our state’s memory, but the past year was the 150th anniversary of his 1868 election as Governor during Reconstruction (1865 to 1877.) That era, when federal troops were still in the state…

Visiting St. Nicholas

  The favorite Saint of the Christmas season is a year-round resident of our city, with two churches, icons and stained glass windows honoring him. “Well, you don’t really see another Saint pictured with a money bag…” Deacon Gregory Haddad,…

Coming Unstrung

  Environmental fiascos are not unusual around New Orleans. After all, it is in a state that measures its vanishing wetlands in football-fields-per-month. The current expected crisis is not the encroaching Gulf of Mexico: it’s quietly flowing from the east:…

Wild About Wild Animals

According to The New Orleans Item, November 12, 1904, the Ringling Brothers Circus’s “menagerie is the finest in the country. It contains the only rhinoceros with any traveling show; two giraffes, a real baby elephant, a hippopotamus, …and a nursery…

Child Prodigies

In the 1840s it wasn’t unusual for New Orleans musicians to perform in benefit concerts for themselves. What was odd about the April 20, 1841 event at the St. Louis Ballroom was that the pianist was all of 11: and…

Memorable Funerals

Over the centuries, this city has raised the staging of funerals to an art form. And, not even a corpse is required. New Orleans, then a Spanish colony, once held a funeral when the King of Spain died. Charles III…

Rhythm and Voice

African music left a lasting imprint on the New Orleans sound, and was certainly heard here in the past. In 1819, Benjamin Latrobe, architect of the United States Capitol and designer of New Orleans’ first waterworks, walked down St. Peter…

Prudent Collection

Saratoga Trunk, a 1945 film, partly set in New Orleans, was based on a novel by Edna Ferber. Ferber, a careful researcher for her historical fiction, had as her heroine “Clio Dulaine,” the daughter of a white father and a…

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